From reading introductory material on Lisp, I now consider the following to be identical:
(list 1 2 3)
'(1 2 3)
However, judging from problems I face when using the quoted form in both Clojure and Emacs Lisp, they are not the same. Can you tell me what the difference is?
Their relation can be analogous to function invocation with 'function name' and funcall.
When you have no idea what function you'll get at runtime, you use funcall.
When you have no idea what element you may get at runtime, your use list.
For people like me who get confused because of existence of backquote and count it as quote tacitly.
backquote is not quote
It's a reader-macro that expands into quote, list or others:
(macroexpand ''(1 2));=> '(1 2)
(macroexpand '`(1 2));=> '(1 2)
(macroexpand '`(1 ,2));=> (list 1 2)
(macroexpand '`(1 ,@foo));=> (cons 1 foo)
(macroexpand '`(1 ,@foo 2));=> (cons 1 (append foo '(2)))